My re-read of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man continues unabated! In this week’s installment: imagery of circling and moving back and forth.

The phrase “hitherandthithering waters of” at the end of Finnegans Wake I.8 has long called to my mind a passage in Portrait — the “bird girl” at the end of Chapter IV. But on this re-read, I’ve been surprised to discover that “hither and thither” appears several other times in the work, usually in a negative context, so it seems that the bird girl passage transforms this phrase into something positive (a parallel to the way that Joyce declares in that passage that his work will transform experience into art).

In Chapter III, near the beginning of retreat, when Father Arnall has begun to activate Stephen’s guilt, he walks home while a “thick fog seemed to compass his mind.” He’s in something of a stupor, watching things move this way and that:

Forms passed this way and that through the dull light. And that was life. The letters of the name of Dublin lay heavily upon his mind, pushing one another surlily hither and thither with slow boorish insistence.

Life is a motion of forms moving hither and thither, and Dublin itself (a microcosm of the fallen world), reduced in his mind to a collection of letters, moves hither and thither through his consciousness.

The phrase reoccurs in the nightmare he has of Hell after the sermon:

Creatures were in the field; one, three, six: creatures were moving in the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces, hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as indiarubber. The malice of evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither, trailing their long tails behind them. A rictus of cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about his ribs a torn flannel waistcoat, another complained monotonously as his beard stuck in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrific faces…

The paragraph is notable for its extreme repetition and its images of circling.

In Chapter IV, when the Director is preparing to ask Stephen if he thinks he has a vocation for the priesthood, he mentions the word “skirts” in French, a word that briefly titillates Stephen. When his blush subsides, an “unresting doubt flew hither and thither before his mind” as he recalls memories of Clongowes. And soon thereafter, as he ponders the possibility of a vocation, and as more memories of Clongowes return, a “din of meaningless words drove his reasoned thoughts hither and thither confusedly.”

After he rejects the vocation, he feels the “call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the
pale service of the altar.” And then wandering almost in a trance, he feels his soul arise out of the “grave of his boyhood.” He feels that he will “create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.” He wades into a rivulet and sees a girl:

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

—Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

It’s a marvelous passage. And here, the phrase “hither and thither” and the blush that was created in his conversation with the priest are both transformed into positive images of his art. The ultimate redemption of the phrase comes in the magical ending of Finnegans Wake I.8:

Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

*

For the remainder of this post, I want to consider the imagery of circles and movement back and forth in Portrait and Finnegans Wake.

But first Dubliners: Joyce had associated circles in that work with the paralysis he saw in the city, the inability of most of its citizens to acquire agency and make changes (both morally and materially). For instance, the creepy man who accosts the boys in “An Encounter” talks in a way that is described as circular, reminding me of the repetitious speech of the Four Old Men in the Wake. The other memorable image of circles in Dubliners comes in “The Dead,” when Gabriel tells the story of the horse Johnny, who travels round and round the statue of King William:

whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue.

Gabriel paced in a circle round the hall in his goloshes amid the laughter of the others.

–Round and round he went, said Gabriel

Circles in Portrait also have negative associations. When Stephen visits brothels at the start of Chapter III,

He would follow a devious course up and down the streets, circling always nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy, until his feet led him suddenly round a dark corner.

The demons in his nightmare of Hell, quoted above, “moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose.”

And during Stephen’s “Holy Roller” period in Chapter IV, when he gives himself over to the repressive and limiting doctrines and practices of Catholicism (which is closely connected to the paralysis explored in Dubliners), the narrator reports, “Every part of his day, divided by what he regarded now as the duties of his station in life, circled about its own centre of spiritual energy.”

So circles seem to be consistently negative, and unless I discover something when I finish re-reading Chapter V, I don’t think circles are recuperated as a positive symbol the way that the phrase “hither and thither” is. It’s a surprise, then, that Finnegans Wake is set up as a circle, with no beginning or end, with the “final” sentence wrapping around to the “first.”

Perhaps Finnegans Wake as a whole is Joyce’s recuperation and redemption of the circle as a symbol. The Wake may be his attempt to “square the circle,” a problem with which Leopold Bloom recalls being occupied by. But where Poldy fails, Joyce succeeds: the circular Finnegans Wake is divided into four parts, like the sides of a square. In his notes, Joyce used the siglum of a square to represent Finnegans Wake itself (ALP’s letter), as well as a circle with a cross in it (four arms). “Squaring the circle” signifies more or less in alchemy the same thing as the philosopher’s stone: the Great Work of enlightenment and attainment, the thing I’ve been calling the Redemption in my discussion of the Wake.

The words “hither and thither” are associated throughout the Wake with Shem and Shaun. Not only does the phrase “hitherandthithering waters” in Chapter I.8 occur amid the washerwomen discussing a “tale told of Shaun or Shem,” the brothers first fully separate in I.4 in “himundher manifestation.” The German “hin und her” means “hither and thither” (the word in the Wake also sounds like “him and her” and “him under her”). The words “hither” and “thither” are referenced many other times in the novel, including at the end of the Mookse and the Gripes, where the washerwomen who gather up the brothers come down to the opposite sides of the river, one to the “thither bank” and the other to the “hither bank.”

The brothers and their battles, which comprise the fallen world, manifest as a hither and thither motion, a back and forth of contraries that recalls the motions of back and forth in Portrait. After all, Stephen imagines an equation he solves in math “spread[ing] out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock’s” and then “fold[ing] itself together again,” just as a “vital wave” that accompanied his first sin “had carried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded.”

The art of Finnegans Wake transforms the hitherandthithering of the fallen world, of the battle of contraries, into redemption, where circles are no longer signs of paralysis but freedom, of an acceptance of the continuing and unending cycles of existence.